VR explorations
Ruinous Ruins by Phonetic Hero & Ben Briggs
Hi all. Pretty quiet month IRL this time. Last Saturday was a birthday party for my sister and her second daughter, but I had to miss it because I woke up with cold symptoms. :P
Progress has been quite encouraging on the DynDatabaseOverride plugin this month. I finished making macros and converting the existing code to use them, and I implemented the code for skills and part of items. There were some snags along the way, mainly having to do with the fact that most things in DynRPG use 1-based indexing, but a few use 0-based, sometimes even when referencing stuff that's usually 1-based. :P I also got the readme file more or less laid out, although there's still quite a lot to fill in for it.
No Ninja Burger scenario this month, although I had one sketched out last Friday -- we just didn't happen to get enough game night participants for it. Another of our players said he'd been thinking about trying to run a session too, so maybe we'll get to see what he'll throw together soon.
On Zelda RPG, Itami got back to Death Mountain and found John, who'd been busying himself collecting seagull eggs on the unpopulated parts of the mountain. She told him she thought she had something of his back at her shop, which Scruvo spotted as an excuse to get John in there, although of course he jumped to the wrong conclusion about Itami's motivations. ;) While they were in there, Dorjan arrived further down the mountain and started demanding to know where Itami went. Itami explained the situation to John, who snapped at her a bit for not telling him sooner (I'm trying to play him as less of an ideal hero char in this incarnation), but turned his attention to what needs to be done before too long. Knowing Dorjan won't hesitate to hurt innocents to get what he wants (indeed, he's getting ready to start flinging fireballs because somebody in the crowd stood up and asked what he wants with Itami), John surmised that getting Dorjan away from the people should be their top priority. Actually, if things do turn ugly right there, I plan to say that the local militia will be enough to drive away Dorjan for now, since he had to leave his undead crew behind to get there quickly...but yeah, somebody will almost certainly get hurt first if that happens.
Over in Gerudo Fortress, Tommy is getting to know Lexa, the fairy who stowed away in his head (which apparently is a thing fairies can do >.>). She was delighted to learn that her new home is a "master thief", although Tommy cautioned her against using the "th" word in mixed company. Tommy then decided they should try out their teamwork by seeing if there was someplace locked up in the fortress which they could break into. After all, it's a fortress of thieves who are friendly toward them -- how could they possibly object to them practicing their thievery? :)
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments:
Yet another Epic Games freebie. Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is an episodic graphic adventure game about, as you'd expect, solving crimes as Sherlock Holmes. There've been a lot of variations on the character and theme of Sherlock Holmes, and of course it's a matter of taste which ones worked well, but this one stays pretty close to the original source. It's set in Victorian England, you play as the brilliant yet eccentric titular consulting detective, and you are accompanied (most of the time anyway) by Holmes's friend and confidante Dr. Watson.
As graphic adventure games go, especially ones that are about detective work, this one is relatively easy. They do a lot to prevent the infamous snags of graphic adventures. At any time, you can consult a list of current tasks for the case, which will tell you which location you need to visit to make progress. When you examine something with multiple important details, the game will automatically exit from examination once you discover them all, and if something has already been explored the icon for interacting with it will turn green. There's some of the typical 'find items in the environment and use them' gameplay, but all you have to do is find the place where an item can be used and the game will prompt you to use it (although oddly, it often won't let you pick up an item until you've found a situation where it would be useful). There are 'keen observation' and 'imagination' modes where things you can't ordinarily interact with (or hardly see in a lot of cases) will be highlighted, but the game prompts you with an icon when they'd be useful. I did still get stuck a few times, but on the whole it was pretty smooth. Personally, I'd rather have that than the frustration of wandering around for hours before finally consulting GameFAQs to learn I'd missed some little detail or there was a moon logic solution to something, although the price is that it didn't much feel like I was making any brilliant deductions.
Where the game does prove a little difficult, and for reasons that aren't entirely fair, is in the final conclusion of each case. There are clues that can be interpreted one way or another -- for example, to explain the fact that a victim was pinned to a wall by a harpoon, you could conclude that the perpetrator was a skilled harpoonist, or that there were two murderers who combined their strength to drive the harpoon through the victim. You're supposed to take all the clues (including some things that aren't specifically spelled out for you) and find the explanation that fits them all into a cohesive whole with no contradictions, but it usually at least feels like you're making a bit of an intuitive leap. They do allow you to go back and change your decision after viewing a cutscene showing the results of your conclusion, and there's an optional check which shows you whether you were actually correct. The one time I got a conclusion wrong, it was fairly obvious from the tone of the cutscene, and when I went back to see the right one, it didn't explain anything about why the facts implicated the real murderer. e.e I'd have liked to know why the evidence which I had thought cleared the murderer as a suspect was misleading.
Bottom line? A decent adventure game that avoids most of the foibles of the genre and delivers a pretty good classic Sherlock Holmes feel. Get it if you're a fan of such.
The Stanley Parable:
This was an indie darling released nearly a decade ago; the fact that I've only now gotten around to playing it could be considered by some as a black mark on me as a game dev. X) It's in the genre of "walking simulator", a first-person "game" where all you can do is move around and occasionally click on something. And crouch in this case, which does have a rare usage.
Anyway, you play the part of Stanley, an office employee whose job is to press keys in response to prompts on his computer screen. But then one day, as pointed out by the slightly stuffy-sounding narrator, the prompts stopped coming in. When you get up to investigate what's going on, you find out that all of your coworkers have mysteriously disappeared. There's occasional uncertainty about which way to go in your path to the boss's office, but the narrator helpfully fills you in on which way Stanley went before you actually do it. Eventually you find that there is a MIND CONTROL FACILITY hidden in the bowels of the company building. 8O So you courageously switch off the machinery, then are rewarded with escape into the outside world!
The End.
...Unless of course, you care to play again. It was only about a ten-minute experience, after all, so it won't take long to re-run it. And maybe this time, you could take a little detour to peek into the right-hand hallway, instead of the left which the narrator guided you down. Or go downstairs when he said up. Or see what happens when you actually try using the mind-control facility yourself. +.+ The narrator might get a little flustered with your uncooperative behavior, of course. And it's possible that not all the apparent pathways in the game lead to fully fleshed-out level architecture...
Without spoiling too much, The Stanley Parable is a 'game' that is a self-demonstrating humorous commentary about the nature of games, their relationship with narrative, and choice. Most of this commentary comes through the narrator, who will analyze your motivations for making the choices you do while trying to convince you to get back on track with his game. Some of the paths you can explore get quite bizarre. If you want to be thorough after getting your fill of poking around yourself, I highly recommend looking up a listing of the different endings -- some of them are ridiculously unlikely to be come across in regular play, which is partly the point of them.
Bottom line? Nothing much here if you're looking for an actual game, but if you don't mind a quiet and snicker-inducing art piece to play around with for a couple hours, The Stanley Parable is worth a look.
Half-Life: Alyx:
Hold onto your sense of perspective, we're setting off into the world of VIRTUAL REALITY! 8O My younger brother decided to take the plunge and buy himself a VR headset -- in fact, he eventually bought a second one after-market just so that he'd have backup controllers, because the product line was discontinued and he heard the controllers can act up after a while. Then he lent me his spare set so that I could finish going through the games he had me trying out. n.n As a tangent, the brand he chose was Oculus Quest, and his experience with it hasn't been as satisfactory as he'd like. It's a bit restrictive about what software it will run, and it REQUIRES linking to a Facebook account. :P We had quite a bit of trouble getting it to cooperate with my computers; it refuses to work with my desktop because it's still running Windows 7 with some authentication issues, and for some reason it had trouble direct-linking with my Windows 10 laptop. We eventually got it to work with Virtual Desktop Streamer, an app which facilitates communication between computer and headset via wifi -- which means a slight performance hit.
Anyway, on to the game itself! Half-Life: Alyx is a prequel in which you play as Alyx Vance, the partner NPC from Half-Life 2 and its confusingly-named Episode 1 and Episode 2 continuations. It fills you in a bit on the time between the Combine's conquest of Earth and Gordon Freeman's return, although it's pretty much the same world you see in the other games. Without spoiling too much, though, it's not entirely the sort of prequel that has no bearing on the story that has come before. In fact, it's something that will be quite a game-changer for the story moving forward...whenever that happens. >.>
In gameplay terms, it's fairly similar to what has come before, just with a new interface -- although that in itself is quite a marked change. Turns out that aiming a gun in your hand in 3D space is actually a lot harder than just moving a mouse reticle onto a target. X) In compensation for this increased difficulty, the combat encounters in this game are a lot lighter and less frequent than in your typical FPS. You're faced with two, maybe three enemies at a time early on, and they don't attack as aggressively. Eventually you can upgrade your weapons to tilt the odds in your favor, and you're given tougher combat accordingly. Laser sights are especially helpful, making aiming almost (though not quite) a matter of just lining up a reticle again.
It's worth noting that the movement scheme, at least by default, is also quite different. Rather than walking, strafing, and turning smoothly as usual, you turn in set increments (45 degrees default) and actually teleport around by indicating the next spot you want to move to within range and obstacles. This is mainly, I surmise, because some people get motion sickness if they see smooth, "realistic" movement within the VR world while not actually moving themselves. Personally, I found I could play in more traditional FPS movement mode for hours at a time before I started feeling a touch queasy, and I highly recommend giving that a try. It makes navigation much easier, especially in combat where a foot or so makes the difference between being behind cover or getting shot.
Half-Life 2 is famous for the gravity gun, which allowed Gordon to pull in objects and then launch them away at high velocity. Half-Life: Alyx plays with a similar mechanic in glove form. You can point at small objects and "flick" them towards yourself, then catch them in midair. There's no similar launching capability, just your own arms to throw things, so you won't be cutting zombies in half with circular sawblades this time. Even the cases where throwing things is handy is rather unreliable -- I can't tell you how many times I threw a grenade which simply dropped straight down at my feet. :P But while the gloves generally aren't all that involved in the actual mechanics of the game, they're a huge quality-of-life improvement for just interacting with the world. With those as a fictional excuse, you don't have to walk/teleport over to pick up ammo or other resources, just point and flick. It would get really old having to reach out and physically touch at close range every time. Makes me wonder how other games that don't have such in-universe justifications will handle it. Probably just hand-wave with traditional "anything you walk over you automatically pick up".
Bottom line? The core experience is actually pretty similar to Half-Life 2, just with more nuanced aiming, fewer and simpler guns, and more emphasis on puzzles over combat. If any game can convince you to invest in VR hardware, this would be the one. Get it if you're ready to take the plunge.
Click to viewHi all. Pretty quiet month IRL this time. Last Saturday was a birthday party for my sister and her second daughter, but I had to miss it because I woke up with cold symptoms. :P
Progress has been quite encouraging on the DynDatabaseOverride plugin this month. I finished making macros and converting the existing code to use them, and I implemented the code for skills and part of items. There were some snags along the way, mainly having to do with the fact that most things in DynRPG use 1-based indexing, but a few use 0-based, sometimes even when referencing stuff that's usually 1-based. :P I also got the readme file more or less laid out, although there's still quite a lot to fill in for it.
No Ninja Burger scenario this month, although I had one sketched out last Friday -- we just didn't happen to get enough game night participants for it. Another of our players said he'd been thinking about trying to run a session too, so maybe we'll get to see what he'll throw together soon.
On Zelda RPG, Itami got back to Death Mountain and found John, who'd been busying himself collecting seagull eggs on the unpopulated parts of the mountain. She told him she thought she had something of his back at her shop, which Scruvo spotted as an excuse to get John in there, although of course he jumped to the wrong conclusion about Itami's motivations. ;) While they were in there, Dorjan arrived further down the mountain and started demanding to know where Itami went. Itami explained the situation to John, who snapped at her a bit for not telling him sooner (I'm trying to play him as less of an ideal hero char in this incarnation), but turned his attention to what needs to be done before too long. Knowing Dorjan won't hesitate to hurt innocents to get what he wants (indeed, he's getting ready to start flinging fireballs because somebody in the crowd stood up and asked what he wants with Itami), John surmised that getting Dorjan away from the people should be their top priority. Actually, if things do turn ugly right there, I plan to say that the local militia will be enough to drive away Dorjan for now, since he had to leave his undead crew behind to get there quickly...but yeah, somebody will almost certainly get hurt first if that happens.
Over in Gerudo Fortress, Tommy is getting to know Lexa, the fairy who stowed away in his head (which apparently is a thing fairies can do >.>). She was delighted to learn that her new home is a "master thief", although Tommy cautioned her against using the "th" word in mixed company. Tommy then decided they should try out their teamwork by seeing if there was someplace locked up in the fortress which they could break into. After all, it's a fortress of thieves who are friendly toward them -- how could they possibly object to them practicing their thievery? :)
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments:
Yet another Epic Games freebie. Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments is an episodic graphic adventure game about, as you'd expect, solving crimes as Sherlock Holmes. There've been a lot of variations on the character and theme of Sherlock Holmes, and of course it's a matter of taste which ones worked well, but this one stays pretty close to the original source. It's set in Victorian England, you play as the brilliant yet eccentric titular consulting detective, and you are accompanied (most of the time anyway) by Holmes's friend and confidante Dr. Watson.
As graphic adventure games go, especially ones that are about detective work, this one is relatively easy. They do a lot to prevent the infamous snags of graphic adventures. At any time, you can consult a list of current tasks for the case, which will tell you which location you need to visit to make progress. When you examine something with multiple important details, the game will automatically exit from examination once you discover them all, and if something has already been explored the icon for interacting with it will turn green. There's some of the typical 'find items in the environment and use them' gameplay, but all you have to do is find the place where an item can be used and the game will prompt you to use it (although oddly, it often won't let you pick up an item until you've found a situation where it would be useful). There are 'keen observation' and 'imagination' modes where things you can't ordinarily interact with (or hardly see in a lot of cases) will be highlighted, but the game prompts you with an icon when they'd be useful. I did still get stuck a few times, but on the whole it was pretty smooth. Personally, I'd rather have that than the frustration of wandering around for hours before finally consulting GameFAQs to learn I'd missed some little detail or there was a moon logic solution to something, although the price is that it didn't much feel like I was making any brilliant deductions.
Where the game does prove a little difficult, and for reasons that aren't entirely fair, is in the final conclusion of each case. There are clues that can be interpreted one way or another -- for example, to explain the fact that a victim was pinned to a wall by a harpoon, you could conclude that the perpetrator was a skilled harpoonist, or that there were two murderers who combined their strength to drive the harpoon through the victim. You're supposed to take all the clues (including some things that aren't specifically spelled out for you) and find the explanation that fits them all into a cohesive whole with no contradictions, but it usually at least feels like you're making a bit of an intuitive leap. They do allow you to go back and change your decision after viewing a cutscene showing the results of your conclusion, and there's an optional check which shows you whether you were actually correct. The one time I got a conclusion wrong, it was fairly obvious from the tone of the cutscene, and when I went back to see the right one, it didn't explain anything about why the facts implicated the real murderer. e.e I'd have liked to know why the evidence which I had thought cleared the murderer as a suspect was misleading.
Bottom line? A decent adventure game that avoids most of the foibles of the genre and delivers a pretty good classic Sherlock Holmes feel. Get it if you're a fan of such.
The Stanley Parable:
This was an indie darling released nearly a decade ago; the fact that I've only now gotten around to playing it could be considered by some as a black mark on me as a game dev. X) It's in the genre of "walking simulator", a first-person "game" where all you can do is move around and occasionally click on something. And crouch in this case, which does have a rare usage.
Anyway, you play the part of Stanley, an office employee whose job is to press keys in response to prompts on his computer screen. But then one day, as pointed out by the slightly stuffy-sounding narrator, the prompts stopped coming in. When you get up to investigate what's going on, you find out that all of your coworkers have mysteriously disappeared. There's occasional uncertainty about which way to go in your path to the boss's office, but the narrator helpfully fills you in on which way Stanley went before you actually do it. Eventually you find that there is a MIND CONTROL FACILITY hidden in the bowels of the company building. 8O So you courageously switch off the machinery, then are rewarded with escape into the outside world!
The End.
...Unless of course, you care to play again. It was only about a ten-minute experience, after all, so it won't take long to re-run it. And maybe this time, you could take a little detour to peek into the right-hand hallway, instead of the left which the narrator guided you down. Or go downstairs when he said up. Or see what happens when you actually try using the mind-control facility yourself. +.+ The narrator might get a little flustered with your uncooperative behavior, of course. And it's possible that not all the apparent pathways in the game lead to fully fleshed-out level architecture...
Without spoiling too much, The Stanley Parable is a 'game' that is a self-demonstrating humorous commentary about the nature of games, their relationship with narrative, and choice. Most of this commentary comes through the narrator, who will analyze your motivations for making the choices you do while trying to convince you to get back on track with his game. Some of the paths you can explore get quite bizarre. If you want to be thorough after getting your fill of poking around yourself, I highly recommend looking up a listing of the different endings -- some of them are ridiculously unlikely to be come across in regular play, which is partly the point of them.
Bottom line? Nothing much here if you're looking for an actual game, but if you don't mind a quiet and snicker-inducing art piece to play around with for a couple hours, The Stanley Parable is worth a look.
Half-Life: Alyx:
Hold onto your sense of perspective, we're setting off into the world of VIRTUAL REALITY! 8O My younger brother decided to take the plunge and buy himself a VR headset -- in fact, he eventually bought a second one after-market just so that he'd have backup controllers, because the product line was discontinued and he heard the controllers can act up after a while. Then he lent me his spare set so that I could finish going through the games he had me trying out. n.n As a tangent, the brand he chose was Oculus Quest, and his experience with it hasn't been as satisfactory as he'd like. It's a bit restrictive about what software it will run, and it REQUIRES linking to a Facebook account. :P We had quite a bit of trouble getting it to cooperate with my computers; it refuses to work with my desktop because it's still running Windows 7 with some authentication issues, and for some reason it had trouble direct-linking with my Windows 10 laptop. We eventually got it to work with Virtual Desktop Streamer, an app which facilitates communication between computer and headset via wifi -- which means a slight performance hit.
Anyway, on to the game itself! Half-Life: Alyx is a prequel in which you play as Alyx Vance, the partner NPC from Half-Life 2 and its confusingly-named Episode 1 and Episode 2 continuations. It fills you in a bit on the time between the Combine's conquest of Earth and Gordon Freeman's return, although it's pretty much the same world you see in the other games. Without spoiling too much, though, it's not entirely the sort of prequel that has no bearing on the story that has come before. In fact, it's something that will be quite a game-changer for the story moving forward...whenever that happens. >.>
In gameplay terms, it's fairly similar to what has come before, just with a new interface -- although that in itself is quite a marked change. Turns out that aiming a gun in your hand in 3D space is actually a lot harder than just moving a mouse reticle onto a target. X) In compensation for this increased difficulty, the combat encounters in this game are a lot lighter and less frequent than in your typical FPS. You're faced with two, maybe three enemies at a time early on, and they don't attack as aggressively. Eventually you can upgrade your weapons to tilt the odds in your favor, and you're given tougher combat accordingly. Laser sights are especially helpful, making aiming almost (though not quite) a matter of just lining up a reticle again.
It's worth noting that the movement scheme, at least by default, is also quite different. Rather than walking, strafing, and turning smoothly as usual, you turn in set increments (45 degrees default) and actually teleport around by indicating the next spot you want to move to within range and obstacles. This is mainly, I surmise, because some people get motion sickness if they see smooth, "realistic" movement within the VR world while not actually moving themselves. Personally, I found I could play in more traditional FPS movement mode for hours at a time before I started feeling a touch queasy, and I highly recommend giving that a try. It makes navigation much easier, especially in combat where a foot or so makes the difference between being behind cover or getting shot.
Half-Life 2 is famous for the gravity gun, which allowed Gordon to pull in objects and then launch them away at high velocity. Half-Life: Alyx plays with a similar mechanic in glove form. You can point at small objects and "flick" them towards yourself, then catch them in midair. There's no similar launching capability, just your own arms to throw things, so you won't be cutting zombies in half with circular sawblades this time. Even the cases where throwing things is handy is rather unreliable -- I can't tell you how many times I threw a grenade which simply dropped straight down at my feet. :P But while the gloves generally aren't all that involved in the actual mechanics of the game, they're a huge quality-of-life improvement for just interacting with the world. With those as a fictional excuse, you don't have to walk/teleport over to pick up ammo or other resources, just point and flick. It would get really old having to reach out and physically touch at close range every time. Makes me wonder how other games that don't have such in-universe justifications will handle it. Probably just hand-wave with traditional "anything you walk over you automatically pick up".
Bottom line? The core experience is actually pretty similar to Half-Life 2, just with more nuanced aiming, fewer and simpler guns, and more emphasis on puzzles over combat. If any game can convince you to invest in VR hardware, this would be the one. Get it if you're ready to take the plunge.